Page 92 - Gay San Francisco: Eyewitness Drummer - Vol. 1

72 Jack Fritscher, Ph.D.
hands on art, art suffers the slings and arrows of outrageous
fortunehunters. If business exists to supply the demand, business
must often create the demand. Advertisers tell us what they think
we need; what they want us to demand, so they can supply it. In
the following blank, enter your nominee for the most worthless
product ever plugged as a necessity: .

Upon seeing that blank line, I first thought of feminine deodorant
spray, diet soda, Fox News, and the National Republican Convention.
Fritscher is an uncanny swami — well, he is a witch! — whose instincts
and life experiences have made him an extremely prophetic social critic.
About the 1990s, he stated to John F. Karr in The Bay Area Reporter in
1989:

I think in the 90s we’re going to see a resurgence of gays in
the media, especially as the AIDS cases explode, and we serve as
the model for the world on how to deal with this . . . . So instead
of The Golden Girls dropping their gay butler, you’ll see gay
people returning to [visibility on] the tube. And I think that will
allow gay erotica to grow on a level of above-ground commercial
television and video.

Fritscher also predicted that we would see a wider range of gay char-
acters both on television and in films in the 1990s. Philadelphia, The Bird
Cage, Beautiful Thing, The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls In Love,
and In and Out were each a box office success. Multiple gay characters hit
the television scene and gave us Will and Grace, Roseanne, Queer as Folk,
and HBO’s Six Feet Under. His instincts for media analysis were right on.
Gay culture has started to swim more toward the mainstream although
only Queer as Folk and Six Feet Under avoid desaturation of gays and dare
feature homosexual characters who actually have sex. Queer as Folk works
the diversity of gay characters, while on Six Feet Under the characters lean
more distinctly to homomasculinity.
Fritscher was likewise correct about the incredible mobilization of
the gay community in the 1990s to battle AIDS. Grossly and inhumanely
over-inflated medication costs, and our abilities to adjust our sexual
behaviors have been, for the most part, successful. Unfortunately, accord-
ing to most recent reports, gay men are backsliding again in regard to safer
sex practices but that is another dangerously spicy enchilada entirely. Frit-
scher was quoted in the magazine, Continuum (November 1996), by the
Canadian author, Ian Young, who wrote an article titled “The AIDS Cult
and Its Seroconverts.” Fritscher said: “Purposely, some twenty-something

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